The Passionate Friends
"Old Stephen!" she cried with the note of a mother. "They will worry you
in politics."
I laughed. "Perhaps I'm not altogether so simple."
"Oh! you'll get through. You have a way of going on. But I shall have
to watch over you. I see I shall have to watch over you. Tell me of the
things you mean to do. Where are you standing?"
I began to tell her a little disjointedly of the probabilities of my
Yorkshire constituency....
§ 6
I have a vivid vignette in my memory of my return to my father's house,
down through the pine woods and by the winding path across the deep
valley that separated our two ridges. I was thinking of Mary and nothing
but Mary in all the world and of the friendly sweetness of her eyes and
the clean strong sharpness of her voice. That sweet white figure of
Rachel that had been creeping to an ascendancy in my imagination was
moonlight to her sunrise. I knew it was Mary I loved and had always
loved. I wanted passionately to be as she desired, the friend she
demanded, that intimate brother and confederate, but all my heart cried
out for her, cried out for her altogether.
I would be her friend, I repeated to myself, I would be her friend. I
would talk to her often, plan with her, work with her. I could put my
meanings into her life and she should throw her beauty over mine. I
began already to dream of the talk of to-morrow's meeting....
§ 7
And now let me go on to tell at once the thing that changed life for
both of us altogether, that turned us out of the courses that seemed
set for us, our spacious, successful and divergent ways, she to the
tragedy of her death and I from all the prospects of the public career
that lay before me to the work that now, toilsomely, inadequately and
blunderingly enough, I do. It was to pierce and slash away the
appearances of life for me, it was to open my way to infinite
disillusionment, and unsuspected truths. Within a few weeks of our
second meeting Mary and I were passionately in love with one another; we
had indeed become lovers. The arrested attractions of our former love
released again, drew us inevitably to that. We tried to seem outwardly
only friends, with this hot glow between us. Our tormented secret was
half discovered and half betrayed itself. There followed a tragi-comedy
of hesitations and disunited struggle. Within four months the crisis of
our two lives was past....
It is not within my purpose to tell you, my son, of the particular
events, the particular comings and goings, the chance words, the chance
meetings, the fatal momentary misunderstandings that occurred between
us. I want to tell of something more general than that. This
misadventure is in our strain. It is our inheritance. It is a
possibility in the inheritance of all honest and emotional men and
women. There are no doubt people altogether cynical and adventurous to
whom these passions and desires are at once controllable and permissible
indulgences without any radiation of consequences, a secret and
detachable part of life, and there may be people of convictions so
strong and simple that these disturbances are eliminated, but we
Strattons are of a quality neither so low nor so high, we stoop and
rise, we are not convinced about our standards, and for many
generations to come, with us and with such people as the Christians, and
indeed with most of our sort of people, we shall be equally desirous of
free and intimate friendship and prone to blaze into passion and
disaster at that proximity.
This is one of the essential riddles in the adaptation of such human
beings as ourselves to that greater civilized state of which I dream. It
is the gist of my story. It is one of the two essential riddles that
confront our kind. The servitude of sex and the servitude of labor are
the twin conditions upon which human society rests to-day, the two
limitations upon its progress towards a greater social order, to that
greater community, those uplands of light and happy freedom, towards
which that Being who was my father yesterday, who thinks in myself
to-day, and who will be you to-morrow and your sons after you, by his
very nature urges and must continue to urge the life of mankind. The
story of myself and Mary is a mere incident in that gigantic, scarce
conscious effort to get clear of toils and confusions and encumbrances,
and have our way with life. We are like little figures, dots ascendant
upon a vast hillside; I take up our intimacy for an instant and hold it
under a lens for you. I become more than myself then, and Mary stands
for innumerable women. It happened yesterday, and it is just a part of
that same history that made Edmond Stratton of the Hays elope with
Charlotte Anstruther and get himself run through the body at Haddington
two hundred years ago, which drove the Laidlaw-Christians to Virginia in
'45, gave Stratton Street to the moneylenders when George IV. was
Regent, and broke the heart of Margaret Stratton in the days when
Charles the First was king. With our individual variations and under
changed conditions the old desires and impulses stirred us, the old
antagonisms confronted us, the old difficulties and sloughs and
impassable places baffled us. There are times when I think of my history
among all those widespread repeated histories, until it seems to me that
the human Lover is like a creature who struggles for ever through a
thicket without an end....
There are no universal laws of affection and desire, but it is
manifestly true that for the most of us free talk, intimate association,
and any real fellowship between men and women turns with an extreme
readiness to love. And that being so it follows that under existing
conditions the unrestricted meeting and companionship of men and women
in society is a monstrous sham, a merely dangerous pretence of
encounters. The safe reality beneath those liberal appearances is that a
woman must be content with the easy friendship of other women and of one
man only, letting a superficial friendship towards all other men veil
impassable abysses of separation, and a man must in the same way have
one sole woman intimate. To all other women he must be a little blind, a
little deaf, politely inattentive. He must respect the transparent,
intangible, tacit purdah about them, respect it but never allude to it.
To me that is an intolerable state of affairs, but it is reality. If you
live in the spirit of any other understanding you will court social
disaster. I suppose it is a particularly intolerable state of affairs to
us Strattons because it is in our nature to want things to seem what
they are. That translucent yet impassible purdah outrages our veracity.
And it is plain to me that our social order cannot stand and is not
standing the tensions it creates. The convention that passions and
emotions are absent when they are palpably present broke down between
Mary and myself, as it breaks down in a thousand other cases, as it
breaks down everywhere. Our social life is honeycombed and rotten with
secret hidden relationships. The rigid, the obtuse and the
unscrupulously cunning escape; the honest passion sooner or later flares
out and destroys.... Here is a difficulty that no bullying imposition of
arbitrary rules on the one hand nor any reckless abandonment of law on
the other, can solve. Humanity has yet to find its method in sexual
things; it has to discover the use and the limitation of jealousy. And
before it can even begin to attempt to find, it has to cease its present
timid secret groping in shame and darkness and turn on the light of
knowledge. None of us knows much and most of us do not even know what is
known.
§ 8
The house is very quiet to-day. It is your mother's birthday, and you
three children have gone with her and Mademoiselle Potin into the forest
to celebrate the occasion. Presently I shall join you. The sunlit
garden, with its tall dreaming lilies against the trellised vines upon
the wall, the cedars and the grassy space about the sundial, have that
distinguished stillness, that definite, palpable and almost outlined
emptiness which is so to speak your negative presence. It is like a
sheet of sunlit colored paper out of which your figures have been cut.
There is a commotion of birds in the jasmine, and your Barker reclines
with an infinite tranquillity, a masterless dog, upon the lawn. I take
up this writing again after an interval of some weeks. I have been in
Paris, attending the Sabotage Conference, and dealing with those
intricate puzzles of justice and discipline and the secret sources of
contentment that have to be solved if sabotage is ever to vanish from
labor struggles again. I think a few points have been made clearer in
that curious riddle of reconciliations....
Now I resume this story. I turn over the sheets that were written and
finished before my departure, and come to the notes for what is to
follow.
Perhaps my days of work in Paris have carried my mind on beyond the
point at which I left the narrative. I sit as it were among a pile of
memories that are now all disordered and mixed up together, their proper
sequences and connexions lost. I cannot trace the phases through which
our mutual passion rode up through the restrained and dignified
intentions of our friendship. But I know that presently we were in a
white heat of desire. There must have been passages that I now
altogether forget, moments of tense transition. I am more and more
convinced that our swiftest, intensest, mental changes leave far less
vivid memories than impressions one receives when one is comparatively
passive. And of this phase in my life of which I am now telling I have
clear memories of a time when we talked like brother and sister, or like
angels if you will, and hard upon that came a time when we were planning
in all our moments together how and when and where we might meet in
secret and meet again.
Things drift with a phantom-like uncertainty into my mind and pass
again; those fierce motives of our transition have lost now all stable
form and feature, but I believe there was a curious tormenting urgency
in our jealousy of those others, of Justin on my part and of Rachel on
hers. At first we had talked quite freely about Rachel, had discussed my
conceivable marriage with her. We had indeed a little forced that topic,
as if to reassure ourselves of the honesty of our new footing. But the
force that urged us nearer pervaded all our being. It was hard enough to
be barred apart, to snatch back our hands from touching, to avoid each
other's eyes, to hurry a little out of the dusk towards the lit house
and its protecting servants, but the constant presence and suggestion of
those others from whom there were no bars, or towards whom bars could be
abolished at a look, at an impulse, exacerbated that hardship, roused a
fierce insatiable spirit of revolt within us. At times we grew angry
with each other's formalism, came near to quarrelling....
I associate these moods with the golden stillnesses of a prolonged and
sultry autumn, and with slowly falling leaves....
I will not tell you how that step was taken, it matters very little to
my story, nor will I tell which one of us it was first broke the
barriers down.
§ 9
But I do want to tell you certain things. I want to tell you them
because they are things that affect you closely. There was almost from
the first a difference between Mary and myself in this, that I wanted to
be public about our love, I wanted to be open and defiant, and
she--hesitated. She wanted to be secret. She wanted to keep me; I
sometimes think that she was moved to become my mistress because she
wanted to keep me. But she also wanted to keep everything else in her
life,--her position, her ample freedoms and wealth and dignity. Our love